The Secret to Productive Meetings: Make Then Tight, Loud and Fun
Have you ever fallen asleep during a meeting, zoned out, or wished you could transport yourself from the conference room to a serene desert island? You aren’t alone. Almost 46% of employees said they would rather do anything else than sit in a meeting.
How can you transform your organization with dull meetings into a culture of highly productive meetings?
When I was president of SRBL Architects, I found three key elements that took our meetings from tedious to dynamic. We made them tight, loud, and fun.
1. Tight
Productive meetings are tight, which we defined as timely, focused, and energetic.
The first and most effective change we made was to decide the types of meetings we felt were vital. Next, we labeled each meeting type, established meeting frequency, and determined who needed to participate. We created a list.
A few examples were:
Production Scheduling Meeting: every other week, include production scheduler, partners, and project managers.
Leadership Team Meeting: weekly, include partners, senior project managers, and financial/office manager.
Strategic Goal Progress Meeting: quarterly, include all goal champions.
Marketing Meeting: every other week, include partners, senior project managers, and marketing manager.
State of the Firm Meeting: quarterly, include all staff.
We stuck to our agenda, started and stopped on time, and before dispersing, we summarized agreed-upon action items. If something important but off-topic came up, it was recorded, quickly decided when we would discuss it, and assigned someone to get it onto the next relevant agenda.
We also decided only to schedule internal meetings on Mondays or Friday mornings, leaving the remaining days to meet with clients. Monday became a heavy day of internal meetings. But we found it an efficient way to start the week, collectively agree to pressing responsibilities, and make sure everyone was rowing in the same direction. It also saved us time throughout the week.
2. Loud
Our second step to create more productive meetings was to encourage healthy debate among all meeting participants. Everyone could voice their opinion strongly while the rest of the group would actively listen and respectfully consider the idea with an open mind. We squashed the “meeting after the meeting,” where someone might come up to a partner and say, “I felt uncomfortable mentioning this, but…” At our organization, there was only one place to bring ideas for a team decision, and that was at the meeting.
People are more likely to accept group decisions that counter their own opinions when they feel they had an opportunity to add to the pool of shared meaning and participate in the decision-making process.
3. Fun
The final way we made our meetings more productive was by creating an exciting and fun meeting space for each type of meeting we held. We tripled our number of meeting areas to encourage team solutions. This also enabled us to invite our clients into our space so they could interact with more team members and participate in a more enjoyable, experiential design process. We created vibrant spaces that encouraged discussion and resulted in sound decision-making by rethinking every aspect of each meeting space. This included room dimensions, table shapes and sizes, seating options, and design finishes, including refrigerators, TVs, monitors, and audiovisual equipment, and material colors.
Sometimes this meant changing the scenery and getting out of our office space. For example, our annual strategic planning retreats and follow-up progress meetings were held in meeting spaces that signaled a shift away from daily operations to big-picture brainstorming. Weekly partners’ meetings were held off-site in our favorite neighboring restaurants. We could talk privately, enjoy a healthy meal, multi-task, laugh a bit, and update one another on pressing issues.
I believe leaders shouldn’t wish away all their meetings. Instead, create an environment conducive for productive meetings. The “playing field” of the CEO or leader is the meeting room, and that is the place and time where leaders need to produce superior results. Make your meetings tight, loud, and fun, and see them go from sleepy to superior.
Note: This article was written before the COVID pandemic. While the time will certainly come when we can take advantage of meetings that are best held in person, we can also be creative about how we structure virtual meetings.
